All history as reconstruction of the past is of course myth

An Exhibition By Dr. Sultana Afroz: Islam in Jamaica

gess — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:38:12 +0000

The exhibition will be held at The Islamic Central Mosque Regent’s park, London, from August 11th-15th, 2008.

Alhamdullilah, I am very honoured to know sister Sultana, and I can’t wait to meet her finally in London, Isha’Allah. May Allah(SWT) Reward her with good in the Dunya and Akhirah, ameen.

Racist Humor or Just Racism at the New Yorker?

gess — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:50:26 +0000

Racist Humor or Just Racism at the New Yorker?

Remnick’s Latest Blunder

By ISHMAEL REED

Undoubtedly, David Remnick is a good editor, but he sometimes exercises poor judgement. He says that we met while I taught at the University of California at Berkeley. I don’t remember. I first noticed him when he wrote a review of one of my novels, ”The Terrible Twos,” for The Washington Post. In it, he cited a typo that appeared in the uncorrected galleys to condemn the book.

For his book about Muhammad Ali, ”The King of the World, “he received the now defunct Don Imus American Book Award. Rather than reject the prize as a protest against Don Imus’ history of Anti-Semitic tirades, he accepted the award, and when he appeared on the Imus show, the host and his co-horts ridiculed him. Ironically, The New Yorker is a magazine that denounced Minister Louis Farrakhan as an anti-Semite. Maestro Michael Morgan of the Oakland Symphony, who conducted violinist Farrakhan in a performance of one of Mendelssohn’s violin concerto – he said that he wanted to make up in music what he could not say in words- told me that Farrakhan cooperates with local Rabbis to keep their neighborhood crime free, and for years has had a Jewish woman give him violin lessons. Maybe the minister should establish a book award and give one to Remnick.

When Jane Mayer, one of Remnick’s writers, appeared on C-Span, I asked her about the propriety of Remnick taking $100, 00 from Imus. She responded by saying that Remnick wasn’t a racist. She seemed really agitated. Of course, I hadn’t called him that.

Things have improved slightly for African-American writers under Remnick’s editorship. I’ve seen poems by Yusef Komunyaka and Cornelius Eady published there. A poem of mine was published.

A short story by William Melvin Kelley has appeared and they have a regular black contributor, Hilton Als. There have also been features about African-American artists including Sonny Rollins and Kara Walker, but, like other progressive and liberal publications, some of which, like Rolling Stone and The Nation, have endorsed Barack Obama, ninety five percent of The New Yorker writers are white males. In fact, Fox News has more black contributors than The New Yorker, NPR, Rolling Stone and The Nation, which still lists me as a contributor even though I haven’t had anything published there in years and have never been invited on one of their yacht cruises.

Certainly, conditions aren’t as bad for African-American men and black and white women at The New Yorker as they were in the old days when Harold Ross was at the helm. He was so racist that, according to the book, “Genius In Disguise: Harold Ross of the New Yorker” by ThomasKunkel, Ross wouldn’t even hire blacks as messengers.

When I was in elementary school, my grandmother, a domestic, used to bring home copies of The New Yorker from the homes where she was employed. I remember the cartoons depicting blacks as cannibals, with bones in their noses boiling whites in a cauldron, the kind of image that New Yorker cartoonist, Robert Crumb, has re introduced with his Angelfood McSpade, his bone-in-the-nose cartoon black woman who goes about licking toilets and saying things like “ Ah gots de biggests tits in town, “the kind of line that Richard Price and David Simon put into the mouths of their black characters and the image of Africa that we still get on CNN and he Sunday New York Times Magazine.

But now Remnick finds himself embroiled in a controversy and though the majority of those polled, black and white, found the cartoon about the Obamas offensive, he has plenty of defenders including a writer for New York magazine, which regularly features blacks as criminals and thugs, members of the Imus Alumni, and Hitler fan Pat Buchanan and even Joan Walsh of Salon. com. Some of the critics of the cartoon, including the Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel justify it’s appearance on First Amendment grounds. The controversy has been discussed on cable for days with the usual panels, mostly white, and a few Colored Mind Doubles like Bush supporter, Rev. Eugene Rivers, whose background hasn’t been vetted by MSNBC; they should read Boston Magazine.

This is the man that MSNBC uses to slime black leaders like Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton. The Bush adminstration and the media has attempted to impose Rivers upon blacks as a leader without success.

Most of the talking heads don’t know the difference between a caricature, a satire, a lampoon and a parody.

Remnick, says that The New Yorker cartoon about Barack Obama as a Muslim president and Michelle as his Black Power spouse was meant to ridicule the unfounded rumors about the candidate, yet the intention of the cartoonist, Barry Blitt, is unclear.

Using Remnick’s argument, suppose that In order to combat the ancient slander that the Jews kidnapped Christian children for ritualistic purposes, The New Yorker did a cartoon of Sen. Joseph Lieberman attired in streimel, black clothes and shawl and his wife Hadassah attired in wig and long black skirt draining the blood of Christian child to be used for Passover. Do you suppose that there’d be arguments about First Amendment rights were such a cartoon to appear?

And what about Remnick’s defenders, who argue that The New Yorker has a history of printing bold and in-your-face cartoons.

When Henry Louis Gates Jr. edited a 1996 black issue of The New Yorker, some black cartoonists said they were censored by Tina Brown, the then editor.

The Village Voice printed a letter from famed black cartoonist Barbara Brandon in which she complained about The New Yorker magazine’s buying cartoons from 8 black cartoonists but not using them. The Voice printed Ms. Brandon’s rejected cartoon. It showed a white woman angrily reproaching a black woman. She says to a black woman,”Why don’t you get off your butt and get a job.” In the next panel the black woman is sitting at a desk and the white woman says,”Hey, wait a minute. I wanted that job.” This cartoon was turned down by Tina Brown for being”more difficult for people to handle than had been anticipated.” Ms. Brandon answered that being a black cartoonist who made The New Yorker“nervous” was better than being published in The New Yorker.

As for the claim that The New Yorker has a tradition of printing outrageous political cartoons, Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize- winning cartoonist, who defended the Obama cartoon, said that he quit The New Yorker in February 2003 because, “The New Yorker was marching to the same beat as The New York Times. “He said he had trouble getting his anti-Bush cartoons printed there.

While Gates was hired by former editor Tina Brown to denounce Minister Louis Farrakhan, Robert Crumb, a cartoonist whose cartoons have been considered so racist that they have earned a spot at the Jim Crow Museum online at Ferris State U., and at least one was reprinted by a Neo-Nazi magazine, according to Art Speigelman in an interview with Gary Groth, is a regular New Yorker cartoonist. He’s found a home there. Even did a cover. One of his cartoons shows a black power dictator murdering the white president while the white first lady fellates him. The title of the cartoon is “When The Niggers Take Over America.”Take a look at it. Google Robert Crumb “When The Niggers Take Over America. ”It’s accompanied by a cartoon entitled “When The Goddam Jews Take Over America. “

Finally, Harold Ross, The New Yorker’s founder, said that”Coons are either funny or dangerous,” according to”Here at the New Yorker” by Brendan Gill.

I guess the Obama cartoon was supposed to be funny.

Ishmael Reed is the editor of Konch. His new book,”Mixing It Up, Taking On The Media Bullies,” was published this month by De Capo.

Reading Ishmael Reed

gess — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:33:57 +0000

I have accidentally deleted my very long review on Ishmael Reed’s book; Mumbo Jumbo, which I finshed two weeks ago and along with some commentaries on Robinson’s Black Marxism. You can’t imagine how angry I am, but you, the reader, can help me easing my anger by telling what is your opinion on the passage about the Prophet Muhammed (pbuh) in Mumbo Jumbo. Do you think it is blasphemous?

Reading Again A Masterpiece By Cedric J. Robinson

gess — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:38:29 +0000

I have decided finally to buy the book and it was delivered to me last Saturday by post. Once I got it on my hands, I started right away to read and just could not lay it down. The first chapter (The inventions of the Negro) was fantastic! The problem faced by White racists on what to do with Shakespeare’s Othello (I can’t believe Wikipedia today questions his race and skin colour) and the translation of the Bible into English (King James’ version) and Karl Marx’s affection for ancient Greek (”he queried how two societies separated by more than two millennia, by different cultures, by the appearance of a new civilization (Christians), and by untold changes in the forms of productions could share criteria of physical beauty and literary artistry-CJP”)

I leave this quote:

The purpose of racism is to control the behaviour of white people, not Black people. For Blacks, guns and tanks are sufficient.

Otis Madison, “Confronting Racism”, January 1997

A Blackmail - Obama & The New Yorker Cartoon Cover

gess — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:32:30 +0000

Apparently, Obama did not convince the hardcore Zionists (AIPAC) in spite of promising Israel an undivided Jerusalem and do everything to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, but here is the problem: Obama did not rule out in his speech that Jerusalem should be part of Palestinian territory.

From JP Jun 6, 2008 : Obama clarifies united J’lem comment:

But a campaign adviser clarified Thursday that Obama believes

“Jerusalem is a final status issue, which means it has to be negotiated between the two parties” as part of “an agreement that they both can live with.”

“Two principles should apply to any outcome,” which the adviser gave as: “Jerusalem remains Israel’s capital and it’s not going to be divided by barbed wire and checkpoints as it was in 1948-1967.”

Many on the right of the political spectrum among America’s Jews welcomed Obama’s remarks at AIPAC, but the clarification of his position left several cold.

“The Orthodox Union is extremely disappointed in this revision of Senator Obama’s important statement about Jerusalem,” said Nathan Diament, director of public policy for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations. He had sent out a release Wednesday applauding Obama’s Jerusalem remarks in front of AIPAC.

“In the current context, everyone understands that saying ‘Jerusalem… must remain undivided’ means that the holy city must remain unified under Israeli rule, as it has been since 1967,” Diament explained.

“If Senator Obama intended his remarks at AIPAC to be understood in this way, he said nothing that would reasonably lead to such a different interpretation.”

Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America and another Jewish activist who had originally lauded Obama’s statement, now called the candidate’s words “troubling.”

“It means he used the term inappropriately, possibly to mislead strong supporters of Israel that he supports something he doesn’t really believe,” Klein charged.

But congressman Robert Wexler, a Democrat from Florida with ties to the Jewish community and a long-time supporter of Obama, rejected the idea that the Illinois senator had been misleading with his comments.

“Everyone knows that Jerusalem is a final status issue. That is not a secret to anyone. Senator Obama says emphatically that should the Israelis and the Palestinians negotiate [an agreement], he will respect their conclusions and that he will not dictate a particular resolution.”

It seems that the Jewish voters are split in two camps. From the leading article in this month’s issue and where you find the cartoon (Making It, by Ryan Lizza):

In truth, Rush had little to worry about; Obama was already on a different political path. Like every other Democratic legislator who entered the inner sanctum, Obama began working on his “ideal map.” Corrigan remembers two things about the district that he and Obama drew. First, it retained Obama’s Hyde Park base—he had managed to beat Rush in Hyde Park—then swooped upward along the lakefront and toward downtown. By the end of the final redistricting process, his new district bore little resemblance to his old one. Rather than jutting far to the west, like a long thin dagger, into a swath of poor black neighborhoods of bungalow homes, Obama’s map now shot north, encompassing about half of the Loop, whose southern portion was beginning to be transformed by developers like Tony Rezko, and stretched far up Michigan Avenue and into the Gold Coast, covering much of the city’s economic heart, its main retail thoroughfares, and its finest museums, parks, skyscrapers, and lakefront apartment buildings. African-Americans still were a majority, and the map contained some of the poorest sections of Chicago, but Obama’s new district was wealthier, whiter, more Jewish, less blue-collar, and better educated. It also included one of the highest concentrations of Republicans in Chicago.

“It was a radical change,” Corrigan said. The new district was a natural fit for the candidate that Obama was in the process of becoming. “He saw that when we were doing fund-raisers in the Rush campaign his appeal to, quite frankly, young white professionals was dramatic.”

Many of Obama’s campaign contributions are Jewish, and they have another agenda than hardcore Zionists, and to make it clear once again, the Black voters are not in the picture. It is just that, he happens to be Black:

Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them. When he was a community organizer, he channelled his work through Chicago’s churches, because they were the main bases of power on the South Side. He was an agnostic when he started, and the work led him to become a practicing Christian. At Harvard, he won the presidency of the Law Review by appealing to the conservatives on the selection panel. In Springfield, rather than challenge the Old Guard Democratic leaders, Obama built a mutually beneficial relationship with them. “You have the power to make a United States senator,” he told Emil Jones in 2003. In his downtime, he played poker with lobbyists and Republican lawmakers. In Washington, he has been a cautious senator and, when he arrived, made a point of not defining himself as an opponent of the Iraq war.

On Marx, Neo-colonialism And Awqaf

gess — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:00:49 +0000

industrial nonprofitability and awqaf

For a combination of reasons - some psychological - the Muslim powers have formed a notion of contemporary capitalism that is fundamentally flawed, in that it takes over a reasonless optimism from Western speculators, regarding the profitability of industrialisation.

There are several revolutionary movements within the Muslim world which have, for reasons of their own, rejected the capitalist assurances of Western advisors, and adopted a more-or-less Leninist view of the likely fate of local industries, but even this view is defective, because it fails to penetrate to the heart of what Marx really said about industrial profit. Instead, the critique they offer focuses on the well-known problems of distribution, notably demand deficiency. This leaves them wide open to the counter-critique, to the effect that boosting demand with hand-outs of fiat money is inflationary.

In reality, however, the marxian analysis of capitalism makes a fundamental distinction between the capitalism of the merchant and that of the industrial entrepreneur. The dynamic of the latter is in the marxian view self-defeating, in that the progressive substitution of machine for labour power - necessitated by competition - gradually undermines the basis of profitability itself, which is exclusively fresh human labour.

This argument is of course extremely difficult to prove. First one must push out of the way the analytical non-concepts promoted by liberal economics, which appear self-explanatory but in fact foreclose all the essential questions. For example, what is meant by “the productivity of labour”? Output per worker, obviously, but the choice of this concept rather than the concept of “the productivity of capital” makes it appear that labour forces must compete among themselves for the honour of producing most product for least wages, while the competition of capitals goes on elsewhere, quietly automating their jobs and thus overcoming their unprofitable idleness with faultless mechanical activity. On the basis of this sort of analysis, each gain in “labour productivity” authorises a further investment in plant, which destroys the very jobs whose “labour productivity” was the source of self-congratulation. This is not a neutral framework of analysis at all.

If instead one looks at “the productivity of capital” one discovers that indubitably, the higher the technological level involved in capital investment, the harder it is to predict any profitable result from making it, once the period of “technological rent”, which occurs while the individual industrialist is more technologically advanced that his competitors, is over. When they all catch up, the industry as a whole is less profitable, and governments must offer more and more incentives to acquire investment in such industries, since they are politically essential. I have in mind here aircraft, giant computers, nuclear reactors, major transport projects, and other state of the art technological feats. We need them, but they just don’t pay. In Marx’s view, this is because the prices that entrepreneurs buy and sell at are not, collectively, random, but are the necessary results of objective laws, one of which is that only fresh “labour-power” - the potential to work, purchased with a wage - is worth more than its cost.

The ultimate consequence of this is that a fully automated industry could run very successfully for an indefinite period, but it would yield no profits. It would merely cover its costs, with precision, but it would never generate a surplus, since only the injection of fresh labour can do that. Thus, in a profit-seeking world, it would become “a white elephant”, which no one but an asset-stripper could be expected to buy.

On this theory, one can see why industrial capital, in extremis, turns to war. For one thing, the customer is a government, able to guarantee payment for giant military plants out of the state treasury, and to some extent out of a predatory stock market which anticipates new imperial gains from a successful war. For another, the effect of war is to destroy the built-up industrial capital base of the country attacked, and often of the attacker too, allowing industrial investment to start all over again with a lower technological level, a higher proportion of human labour to capital goods, and a resultant higher rate of profit.

Why is this dynamic - if it really exists - hidden not only from the capitalists themselves, but also from the apparently objective Muslims? I think there are both logical and historical reasons. First, I want to make it clear that Marx himself is an incredibly over-ambitious writer, constantly spiralling off from the demonstrable and commonsensical fact into sequences of apocalyptic dementia. Second, I want to stress that what I have said - and indeed what Marx himself says - only applies to industrial capitalism, not to mercantile capitalism, on which the glories of Muslim civilisation were founded. It is only industrial capitalism which methodically replaces human labour with machines.

One can to some extent automate the processes on which mercantile capitalism relies, such as goods transport, which can be automated via containerisation, and the resulting long-range falling rate of profit will then begin to manifest itself, upon the ruins of the transport entrepreneurs who have priced one another out of the market by competing in this way. However, the mercantile empire of the Muslims never showed any interest in doing this, and indeed, has never quite found a specific response to the development of industrial capitalism as such. The leaders of the Muslim world remain torn between the liberal ideology of Western business, which they dubiously assume can generate great wealth if freed from neocolonialist unequal exchange, and the marxian ideology of total state control, which is not only tyrannical and irreligious, but unnecessary, once one finally sees that the marxian critique applies only to industrial capital, not to mercantile capital which can be left in private hands with great advantage.

Historically, the current Muslim leaderships are to a great extent impacted by the processes of Western colonialism and neo-colonialism, which for a long time concentrated on reinforcing the “anti-communist” doctrine, to the effect that marxism was in every respect a maniacal creed akin to nazism but based on the idea of “the dictatorship of the proletariat” instead of that of the dictatorship of a “race”. This is unattractive enough, to rulers of largely traditional religious and agricultural societies, but it can be made worse by demonstrating that in fact all the marxian communist regimes, having degenerated through every phase of tyranny, are now extinct or close to it. This fact is supposed to suggest that liberal economists were right all along.

As far as I know, no one has managed to extract from the large and disagreeable body of Marx’s writings his essential arguments about the constant and inevitable fall in the intrinsic rate of profit of all industrial enterprises. Perhaps it is fortunate that I come from a non-Muslim background, and that during my earlier years I spent many unpleasant hours working my way through the three volumes of Das Kapital, so that I could eventually spill the essential contents in a way that conforms to Muslim sensibilities and aspirations instead of to those of the revolutionary stock villains of which our popular literature is so full.

My reasoning is that the “technosphere”, so to speak, the body of industrial enterprises that exists within any given Muslim state, and which is essential to the civilised survival of both state and people, should be regarded as a sort of waqf, or divinely mandated charitable asset. Thus, it can be maintained at cost in its full functionality, and not sold to asset-strippers or demolished by the bombs of competitors who claim it to be an offense against “the free market” (and against Western, judeo-christian, usury-based world power).

I can’t deny that the Western powers would like to strangle any such thing at its birth, or failing that, to bomb it to smithereens. This is why I want to explore the ideological, theoretical, and even moral questions which underlie the so-called “hegemony” of industrial capitalism. I shall steadfastly insist that it is not “capitalism as a whole” that I am analysing, but solely industrial capitalism, which I define as the process of substitution of machine for human labour in production. It is only within this context that the conventional moral arguments about the merit of “working for one’s living” become problematic, since the industrial worker, unlike any other sort of worker, is perpetually working himself out of a job, and often finds himself specifically employed on the task of making other employees redundant - and all this leading to a state in which there are no workers at all, and no profit at all, just gleaming machines standing in unused factories waiting to be purloined by an asset-stripper and sold off cheap to yield a momentary opportunistic profit elsewhere, since at their full cost they cannot yield profit.

Let us imagine that, by means of a waqf type of administration, the basic automated industries that supply the everyday needs of the citizens can be maintained in operation despite yielding no profit. The question will then arise, with what are the citizens to pay for their produce? Some will possess sufficient incomes from other sources to purchase the produce, and some not. We must look at existing waqfs in the Muslim world, at their history, at the moral, political and economic arguments used to explain their methods of functioning, at their limits (for instance, I do not know of any “free food for the masses” waqfs, but I know of plenty of “free water for the animals” waqfs) - and finally at the confused and confusing Western protestant-jewish idea that “there is no such thing as a free lunch”.

There is nothing in the Qur’an to compare with the sheer sadism of the
judeo-christian curse of Adam, found in the book the Catholics call Genesis and the Jews Bereshit :

3:17 And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;

3:18 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;

3:19 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

However, there is an acceptance in general terms of the fact that this world is an arena of struggle (if not a “vale of tears”) and that it is not morally, emotionally, psychologically or physically healthy for mankind to simply loll around eating the fruit off the trees. Rather, mankind is expected to grasp that, just as in childhood one’s parents make considerable real effort to ensure one’s welfare, so in adulthood one should make considerable efforts to ensure one’s own welfare, and the welfare of any family one is blessed enough to have, and not expect “the welfare state” to provide everything automatically.

I leave to the reader the question of whether bringing into existence, and protecting from criticism, a “technosphere” that is nevertheless able to provide e.g. free food and housing for the masses, would be a meritorious piece of work in itself. I think that it would be highly meritorious, and I think that people’s creativity, their “productivity” in a broader sense than the usual, would be enhanced, not destroyed, if they were free from the basic “care for the morrow”.

In order to find the limits that should really be placed on such a project, limits of good taste and decorum as much as limits of basic morality, I propose a detailed study of the history of the waqfs (correctly, awqaf) of the Muslim world - their finance, their purpose, their achievements, and their limits. I would like to be able to indicate the maximum extent to which such awqaf could remove the cares of everyday survival from Muslims, without inhibiting their “capitalist” initiative, and without adopting the (often perceptibly insane) atheist and materialist views of the unfortunate “marxists” on this much vexed topic.

[I do have highest respect of his writings, but when it comes to religion/theology, that is where I stand out. I hope he does not mind I post his stuff here on my blog. Please, write your comment. I like to know your views. I shall write more when I have more time, Insha'Allah tomorrow .Thank you. gess]

Tariq Ali: Next Door To War

gess — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 11:51:41 +0000

[Before I post the whole article, I want to bring this passage in front, where the most interesting stuff are mentioned in the ending:

"There are three interrelated power blocs in Pakistan. Of these the US lobby is the most influential, the most public and the most hated. It is currently running the country. The Saudis, who use a combination of wealth and religion to get their way, are second in the pecking order and less unpopular. The Chinese lobby is virtually invisible, never interferes in internal politics and for that reason is immensely respected, especially within the army; but it is also the least powerful outside military circles. In Cold War times, the interests of the three lobbies coincided. Not now. The War on Terror has changed all that".]

Tariq Ali does not want to write in plain English that the Americans are “running the country” - literally everything and control the military. I am bit surprised why Tariq Ali does not mention A.Q. Khan.

The full text below:

Descent into Chaos: How the War against Islamic Extremism Is Being Lost in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia by Ahmed Rashid
Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars within by Shuja Nawaz

To recapitulate. After Benazir Bhutto was assassinated last December, her will was read out to the family’s assembled political retainers. Her 19-year-old son, Bilawal, inherited the Pakistan People’s Party, but until he came of age her husband, Asif Zardari, would act as regent. The general election, postponed following her death, took place in February. The immediate impact of the stunning electoral defeat suffered by General Musharraf’s political party and his factotums was to dispel the disillusionment of the citizenry. Not for long. Musharraf is still clinging on to the presidency; Zardari is running the government with the help of his old cronies; the judges dismissed by Musharraf have still not been reinstated; the economy is a mess; and the US Air Force has started dropping bombs on the North-West Frontier Province again. Poor Pakistan.

Forty-five per cent of the electorate voted in the election, more than expected, though the figure was much lower in the Frontier Province, where the spillage from the Afghan war discouraged voters from braving the journey to the polling stations. The new army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, had ordered the ISI not to interfere with the polls and instructed his generals to cease all bilateral contacts with the now civilian president. Musharraf’s defeat would have been even worse had it not been for the violence and vote-rigging in Karachi, where his loyal and armed allies from the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) threatened opposition candidates and their supporters. In at least three cases, armed MQM goons threatened TV journalists with death if the chicanery was reported.

The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) – or BFP (Bhutto Family Party), as some of its own members refer to it in semi-public – emerged as the largest single party in the country, thus propelling the widower Bhutto to power. The Pakistan Muslim League (N), led by the ex-prime minister Nawaz Sharif, came second nationally, but emerged as the largest party in the largest province, the Punjab, where Nawaz’s younger brother Shahbaz is now ensconced as chief minister. In the Frontier Province, the secular Awami National Party (ANP) defeated the Islamists, once again contradicting the widespread view that jihadis are either strong or popular in Pakistan. In Sindh the PPP won comfortably and could have governed on its own, but chose to do so with the MQM. In Baluchistan, largely because of military actions in the province, which borders on Afghanistan, and the killings of nationalist leaders, most local opposition parties boycotted the polls, and it was in this province alone that Musharraf’s party won a majority of assembly seats.

Five months on, democratic fervour, or naivety, has turned to anger. Old Corruption is back. The country is in the grip of a food and power crisis. Inflation is approaching 15 per cent. The price of gas (used for cooking in many homes) has risen by 30 per cent and the price of wheat by more than 20 per cent since November 2007. Food and commodity prices are rising all over the world, but there is an additional problem in Pakistan: too much wheat is being smuggled into Afghanistan to feed the Nato armies. According to a recent survey, 86 per cent of Pakistanis find it increasingly difficult to afford flour, for which they blame their new government. Zardari’s approval rating has plummeted to 13 per cent. Were an election to be held now, he would lose to Sharif by a substantial margin. That this old rogue is now thought of as a man of principle is an indication of how desperate the situation has become.

Two major issues confronted the victors. The first concerned the judiciary. The chief justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, had been a prisoner of the regime since 3 November 2007, detained in his own house, which was sealed off by barbed-wire barricades with a complement of riot police permanently on guard outside. His landlines had been cut and cellphones were incapacitated by jamming devices. His colleagues and the lawyers defending him were subjected to similar treatment. In January, he wrote an open letter to Nicolas Sarkozy, Gordon Brown, Condoleezza Rice and the president of the European Parliament. The letter, which remains unanswered, explained the real reasons for Musharraf’s actions:

At the outset you may be wondering why I have used the words ‘claiming to be the head of state’. That is quite deliberate. General Musharraf’s constitutional term ended on 15 November 2007. His claim to a further term thereafter is the subject of active controversy before the Supreme Court of Pakistan. It was while this claim was under adjudication before a bench of 11 learned judges of the Supreme Court that the general arrested a majority of those judges in addition to me on 3 November 2007. He thus himself subverted the judicial process which remains frozen at that point. Besides arresting the chief justice and judges (can there have been a greater outrage?) he also purported to suspend the constitution and to purge the entire judiciary (even the high courts) of all independent judges. Now only his hand-picked and compliant judges remain willing to ‘validate’ whatever he demands. And all this is also contrary to an express and earlier order passed by the Supreme Court on 3 November 2007.

Before the election, Sharif had pledged that his party would restore the chief justice and the other sacked judges to their former positions and remove those who had replaced them. The PPP’s position on this issue was ambiguous, but soon after their election triumph the widower Bhutto and Sharif agreed publicly that reinstating the judges would be a priority, and promised that they would be returned to office within thirty days of the new government’s being formed. Within the month, the judges were released and restrictions on them removed. This was widely, but wrongly, interpreted as a prelude to their reinstatement. Musharraf and his backers in Washington panicked and the US ambassador summoned Zardari. The message from Washington was clear. The State Department was determined to keep Musharraf in power as long as Bush was in the White House. If the chief justice and his colleagues were to resume office, the under-secretary of state told the new government, there was a possibility that Musharraf would be legally removed from office, and that was unacceptable. His removal would be considered a setback in the War on Terror. The issue brought into the open the differences between the widower and Sharif, which were subsequently aggravated when it was made plain that, unbeknownst to Zardari, Benazir had agreed to work with Musharraf in the War on Terror and to sideline the judges.

Zardari had other worries. A National Reconciliation Ordinance which allowed corrupt politicians to be pardoned had been part of the deal between Benazir and Musharraf. It was much detested and the Supreme Court was due to hear an appeal questioning its legality. Zardari, only too aware of the possibility that the cases against him in European courts might be resurrected, capitulated to the US: the judges would not be reinstated or, at least, not on their own terms. Might the chief justice be interested in a senior position on the International Court of Justice, the US intermediary asked, or perhaps a sinecure at some American university? The chief justice declined.

In May, Zardari and Sharif met in London. Two Muslim League parliamentarians flanked Sharif; two political fixers, Rehman Malik and Husain Haqqani, sat with Zardari. No agreement could be reached on the restoration of the judiciary and, after consulting senior colleagues, Sharif withdrew Muslim League ministers from the government, citing disagreement on this issue. It is extremely rare in Pakistan for a politician to relinquish office on an issue of principle. The ministers who were told to resign were not happy, but they accepted party discipline and Sharif’s popularity soared. The widower’s failure to support the judges provoked great indignation and a number of senior figures in his own party were clearly unhappy at the public embracing of Musharraf. But they had accepted him as their ‘temporary’ leader and so rendered themselves powerless. When told that it was really Benazir who had done the deal they replied that just before her death she was beginning to realise she’d made a mistake. There is no evidence for this, although it helps preserve a few illusions. The trouble is that PPP politicians have grown so accustomed to the Bhutto harness that they can do nothing without it. In the PPP the initiative now lies entirely with Zardari and Malik. They make the key decisions. The prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gillani, seems happy in his role as political eunuch; the PPP cohort in parliament is used as a rubber stamp.

The campaign to defend the judiciary constituted the first nationwide mass movement against military rule since 1969. The Supreme Court decisions challenging the legality of the Musharraf regime had restored the country’s self-respect. But the judges were not popular in the United States or Euroland, where elite opinion was obsessed with occupation and war. For defending the civil rights of the poor, the chief justice was referred to in the Guardian as a ‘judicial activist’ and a ‘firebrand’.

The second major problem confronting the government was the Nato occupation of Afghanistan. Washington and its allies regard the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s role in relation to it as the central priority. Everything else is a diversion. In March, Admiral Olson, the head of the US Special Operations Command, arrived in Islamabad for consultations with the Pakistan military and surprised locals by demanding a meeting with the country’s elected leaders. Olson asked the politicians how they would respond to the US need to make cross-border incursions into Pakistan. The Pakistanis made their opposition clear. The most senior civil servant in the Frontier Province, Khalid Aziz, told Olson that ‘it would be extremely dangerous. It would increase the number of militants, it would be . . . a war of liberation for the Pashtuns. They would say: “We are being slaughtered. Our enemy is the United States.”’ For Sharif, negotiations with militants in Waziristan and a gradual military withdrawal from the area were essential to deter terrorist attacks in Pakistan’s cities. The PPP was not prepared to go quite so far, but it was not in favour of Nato raids inside Pakistan, at least not in public. The ANP leaders, who had supported the US presence in Afghanistan, now refused to go along with Washington’s demands and called for negotiations with Baitullah Masood, a pro-Taliban militia leader in South Waziristan, accused by the CIA of masterminding Benazir Bhutto’s assassination.

Two ANP leaders, Asfandyar Khan and Afrasiab Khattak, were summoned to Washington for meetings with Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, and John Negroponte. There was only one issue on the agenda: cross-border raids. Washington was determined to find Pakistani politicians who would defend them. The ANP leaders refused. ‘We told them physical intervention into the tribal areas by the United States would be a blunder,’ Khattak later told the New York Times. ‘It would create an atmosphere in which the terrorists would rally popular support.’ Owari Ghani, the governor of the Frontier Province and a Musharraf appointee, agreed: ‘Pakistan will take care of its own problems, you take care of Afghanistan on your side . . . Pakistan is a sovereign state. Nato is in Afghanistan; it’s time they did some soldiering.’

Some light is thrown on the Afghan situation by Ahmed Rashid in his new book, Descent into Chaos. As a foreign correspondent on the Far Eastern Economic Review and subsequently the Independent and Daily Telegraph, Rashid has been reporting diligently from the region for more than two decades; when the publication of his book on the Taliban coincided with 9/11, he was projected to media stardom in the United States, repeating a pattern that introduced the Iraqi-American writer Kanan Makiya and the Republic of Fear to the liberal public during the First Gulf War. Both men became prize-cocks of the US defence establishment and the videosphere. Graciously received by Bush in the Oval Office, Makiya strongly backed the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and predicted that the US would be greeted as liberators, looking forward to the day his friend Ahmad Chalabi would be running a ‘liberated Iraq’. It didn’t quite happen like that, but fortune favoured Rashid. The first chapter of Descent into Chaos lavishes praise on his friend Hamid Karzai and the book is full of sentences like ‘On 7 December, with Vice President Cheney in attendance, Karzai took oath as Afghanistan’s first legitimate leader for nearly three decades. Many grizzled old Afghan leaders broke down in tears.’

Rashid’s real argument can be summarised as follows: the war after 9/11 should have been fought in Afghanistan and not Iraq, which was a diversion. A heavy armed presence was needed. Bush and his neocon advisers have let the side down badly by trusting Musharraf and the ISI. Karzai, a legitimate leader, was prepared to embark on reforms, sidelining the Northern Alliance, but the Taliban were allowed to regroup and create chaos, helped by the conspiratorial and ‘Bolshevik-like’ al-Qaida. The real problem is Pakistan, not a Western occupation gone badly wrong, and there is no point being squeamish about what needs to be done. Rashid’s views coincide with those of the Pentagon hawks who have, for the last year, been pressuring Bush and Rice to unleash Special Operations units inside Pakistan on the pretext that al-Qaida has grown substantially and is preparing new attacks on the West.

Rashid was a firm supporter of the Soviet intervention, although he is coy about this in his book. He shouldn’t be. It reveals a certain consistency. Afghanistan, he thinks, can be transformed only through war and occupation by civilised empires. This line of argument avoids the need to concentrate on an exit strategy. Civilian casualties in Afghanistan are high and in the last two months more US and British soldiers have died here than in Iraq. Jaap Scheffer, Nato’s secretary-general, told the Brookings Institution in February that the continuing occupation had less to do with good governance than with the desire to site permanent military bases (and nuclear missiles?) in a country that borders China, Iran and Central Asia. Contributors to the organisation’s house magazine, Nato Review, have argued that the preservation of Western hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region requires a permanent military presence. Whatever the justifications or fantasies, the occupation cannot last, since those who live under it feel they have no option but to back those trying to resist, especially in a part of the world where the culture of revenge is strong.

On 14 May a Predator drone hit the village of Damadola in the Bajaur Agency, close to the Afghan border, and killed more than a dozen people. The US claimed that they had targeted and killed a ‘significant leader’. Akhundzada Chattan, the local member of parliament and a PPP veteran, called a press conference and denounced the US for ‘killing innocents’. ‘The protest lodged by the Pakistan government against the missile raid is not enough,’ he insisted. ‘The government should also sever diplomatic ties with the US and expel its envoy immediately.’ Chattan saw a pattern: whenever the Pakistan government and local insurgents began to talk to each other and discuss a durable peace, Nato targeted the tribal areas inside Pakistan. He appealed to tribal elders, insurgents, the Pakistan army and the new government to cast aside their differences and unite against ‘foreign aggression’. This could indicate that Zardari’s ascendancy is not as secure as he might imagine. It is also a reminder that the decision of successive Pakistan governments to keep the tribal areas formally separate from the rest of the country has become entirely counterproductive. It prevents political parties and other organisations from functioning in the region, leaving political control in the hands of tribal leaders, often with dire results.

In June two F-15 bombers dropped 500 lb bombs in Pakistan killing 11 soldiers and a major from the Frontier Corps. The Pentagon described the action as ‘a legitimate strike in self-defence’, leading Brian Cloughley, an extremely conservative historian of the Pakistan army (and a former commandant of the Australian Psychological Operations Unit in Vietnam) to write:

One can only regard such utterances with contempt, because those who spoke in such a way, and those who ordered them to say what they did, have no concept of loyalty to a friendly country. Nor, for that matter, do they take the slightest heed of international law and custom. The Pentagon quickly distributed a video showing an attack that was said to be a strike on an ‘enemy’ position. There was no indication of where it was, when it was, what ordnance was used, or results of the attack. It was a fatuously amateur exercise in attempted damage control. And of course, later, in the inevitable reassessment (for which read: ‘We’ve been found out and had better think up a more believable version of the lies we told’), it was revealed that ‘a US Air Force document indicates bombs were dropped on buildings near the border, and Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman conceded there may have been another strike that occurred outside the view of the drone’s camera.’

Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington, Husain Haqqani, merely denied that the air strikes had been intentionally hostile and stressed the ‘improving’ . . . partnership between the two countries. Cloughley’s links to GHQ in Islamabad stretch back several decades and it was clear he was giving the view of many senior officers in the Pakistan army, men who fear that such actions and the alliance with Washington will undermine the much vaunted unity of the military high command, with unpredictable and dangerous consequences.

There are three interrelated power blocs in Pakistan. Of these the US lobby is the most influential, the most public and the most hated. It is currently running the country. The Saudis, who use a combination of wealth and religion to get their way, are second in the pecking order and less unpopular. The Chinese lobby is virtually invisible, never interferes in internal politics and for that reason is immensely respected, especially within the army; but it is also the least powerful outside military circles. In Cold War times, the interests of the three lobbies coincided. Not now. The War on Terror has changed all that.

What is missing is a Pakistan lobby, a strong group within the ruling class that puts the interests and needs of the country and its citizens above all else. A survey carried out in May for the New America Foundation revealed that 28 per cent of Pakistanis favour a military role in politics as compared to 45 per cent in August 2007; that were elections to be held now, Sharif would sweep the board; that 52 per cent regard the United States as responsible for the violence in Pakistan; that 74 per cent oppose the War on Terror in Afghanistan. A majority favours a negotiated settlement with the Taliban; 80 per cent hold the government and local businessmen responsible for food scarcity; only 11 per cent see India as the main enemy.

Given the political conjuncture in the country, the publication of Shuju Nawaz’s Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army and the Wars Within is timely. He overlooks links between military entrepreneurship and corruption, but nevertheless this is the best researched and most serious history of the Pakistan army. Nawaz, a former IMF staffer who lives in Washington, had unprecedented access to the military archives. Belonging to a military family, he was treated as an insider and interviewed numerous army personnel. His brother Asif Nawaz was the army chief when he died suddenly and mysteriously in January 1993. His widow received letters suggesting murder. Some were anonymous, two were not. One was from a servant at Prime Minister’s House. He named senior government officials who, he alleged, had told him to put poison in the food served to the general. It was widely rumoured that Sharif (then the prime minister) had had General Nawaz poisoned because a military operation in Sindh against the MQM had embarrassed the government (then in alliance with the MQM) and Asif Nawaz was obstinately refusing to allow a cover-up and, more important, could not be bought off. Sharif denounced these reports. When traces of arsenic were found in the dead general’s hair, Shuja Nawaz fought for a new investigation and the body was exhumed. The military establishment closed ranks and the official inquiry, supported by evidence from US medical experts, upheld the result of the original autopsy: the general had died of a heart attack. Perhaps he did. As with much else in the book the incident is described dispassionately, both sides of the argument are clearly laid out – yet another unsolved mystery involving an illustrious corpse for Pakistan to consider. There might be more of these if the war next door continues.

Tariq Ali’s new book, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, will be published by Simon and Schuster in September.

Source: LRB, 17 July 2008